Agilesparks

Maintaining quality involves a blend of exploratory and automated testing. As new features are developed, exploratory testing ensures that new code meets the quality standard in a broader sense than automated tests alone. This includes ease of use, pleasing visual design, and overall usefulness of the feature in addition to the robust protections against regressions that automated testing provides. 

Exploratory testing is a risk-based, critical thinking approach to testing that enables the person testing to use their knowledge of risks, implementation details, and the customers' needs.

On our development teams, QA team members pair with developers in exploratory testing, a valuable practice during development for fending off more serious bugs. Much like code review, we’ve seen testing knowledge transfer across the development team because of this. When developers become better testers, better code is delivered the first time.